12 Ideas For Decorating A Nonworking Fireplace

Sarah Gibson and Jacqueline Brown, founders of the design and lifestyle blog Room for Tuesday, made this fireplace cozy, sans a single flame. The trick to the aesthetic: Choose a variety of shapes, sizes, and bases, says Gibson. Add luxurious textiles to warm the space. The candle holders are from IKEA and the sheepskin is from One Kings Lane.

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Courtesy of Paula Mills

In her home near Melbourne, Australia, illustrator Paula Mills of Sweet William decorates to reflect her love of vintage goods. Mills purchased the old Tasmanian Oak mantelpiece from a junk shop on the way back from a family camping trip in Victoria, Australia, and filled it with artwork and books. Bits and pieces of places she's lived throughout the years, from South Africa to England, dot the space with a global aesthetic.

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Helen Norman

In this Pennsylvania farmhouse, designer Lauren Liess inset the 1800s mantle with a mirror to reflect the room's textured decor. The walls are stenciled in a Ralph Lauren all-over pattern and the chairs are upholstered in a linen-cotton blend fabric on the reverse (for a soft, barely there pattern).

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Courtesy of Bless'er House

In her Southern home, Lauren Shaver, the blogger behind Bless'er House, filled the faux fireplace from top to bottom with small, light-colored logs. A secret: The "logs" are actually just log ends that have been meticulously organized and glued to a black board, making the arrangement easier to design.

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Courtesy of Karen Bertelsen

Filling a nonworking fireplace with logs offers classic appeal, but blogger Karen Bertelsen of The Art of Doing Stuff took the concept one step further by coloring the ends of each birch log with old folk art paints. Bertelsen showcases the palette she used to mix the colors on the mantle.

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Courtesy of Caught in Grace

For a simple touch in front of her nonworking fireplace, blogger Jaime Scott of Caught in Grace placed three logs on top of a homey wicker basket — a crisp contrast to the black mantel backdrop.

In a Hoboken, New Jersey, 1890s rowhouse, designers Jessica Geller and Virginia Toledo of id 810 design group wanted to echo the freshness of the outdoors. To accessorize the nonworking fireplace, they added a Buddha statue originally from a Tibetan monk garden they found while antiquing.

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id 810 Design Group

Geller and Toledo also filled a Park Avenue apartment's empty fireplace with quartz sculptures layered with votive candles to provide a soft glow when lit, imitating the feeling of a functional fireplace. They recommend including a variety of candles and crystal elements when decorating nonworking fireplaces to create the illusion of a hearth space (simultaneously providing a beautiful room accent).

Don't want to drag real logs into the house? Make your own faux cardboard logs. Blogger Brenna Berger of Paper & Ink used rolled corrugated cardboard coated with plaster to create this textured look of clean birch. The cut ends imitate the rings of larger logs. See how to make your own here.

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Courtesy of Noting Grace

For a glow that resembled a real fire, blogger Jennifer Fancher of Noting Grace filled an old World War II soldier's trunk found at an estate sale with birch wood and Christmas lights. She also lined a cardboard sheet with old dictionary pages, newspapers, novel pages, and sheet music to create a scrapbooked backdrop.

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